Interview with Rob Bourdon

How are people responding to the project?
Great, we didn’t think the whole project would do this well. But looking at the charts, it seems to be doing very well.

What was it like to work with Jay-Z?
We were honored to work with Jay-Z. People often think Jay-Z is careless and languid. I guarantee that Jay-Z is a real professional and very creative.

Did Beyonce come round?
*laughs* Unfortunately not! I would have loved to have met her.

Didn’t Mike get jealous when he heard Jay-Z rappin those hard rhymes almost without any effort?
Jealous? No, but when you’re working with someone like Jay-Z, you know you’re working with one of the best rappers in the world. He’s the best at what he does..

Now something about you. I always see a drummer like a goal-keeper of a soccer team. He’s kind of the weird one of the team. Is that correct?
I’m not really a weirdo, but i do like the comparison with soccer. Actually a drummer should be kind of invisible. The less you actually hear him, the better. However, drummer guides the group. If he plays good, everyone thinks that’s normal, if he makes 2 little mistakes, he will be hearing about it for a long time.

Last year when you played a show in Malaysia, the authorities forbid you to jump and curse on stage. Can we still speak of a real Linkin Park live show?
Yes, of course. We obeyed the rules, because we were so fortunate to be playing a show in Malaysia in the first place.

Are you guys that calm when you’re backstage too?
A lot of stories go round about what happens backstage at a rock show. Like that there’s always a huge party going on, but actually we’re all pretty normal backstage. We don’t drink, 4 of us are married and 1 of us has children. The only thing we do backstage is play videogames.

Do you guys ever do anything exciting?
The only exciting thing that i have done this past year is sleeping in my own bed. I mean, our tour bus is awesome. We have all the comfort in the world on our bus and we even installed a little studio in the back of the bus, but still, I was happy to finally be home again.

Your fans know your tourbus very well. Are you so open to your fans or is it just a way of getting in touch with the female fans?
We’re just nice to our fans like everyone else, because they buy our albums and merchandise. Our merchandise has become a very important factor of our income and if we want our fans to buy our stuff we should be nice to them.

On the back of the album (Collision Course) it says: “witness how Linkin Park and Jay-Z made music history”. Do you really mean that?
Yes and no. What we did has been done before by other artists, but still it’s new. Also, because we have succeed in blending 2 music styles together into a new sound that sounds incredible. Because of that I think we wrote a little piece of music history.